Ray Carney's observations about academic freedom of expression, constraints on course offerings, the censorship of faculty publications, and bureaucratic retaliation against independent-minded faculty members at Boston University. Prof. Carney reflects on the deleterious effect of corporate values in the promotion, pay, and support system, on market pressures on the life of the mind and, above all, on impositions of "pedagogical correctness" in course offerings and student evaluation methods.

Monday, January 23, 2017

No Knowledge No Experience No Problem

Everyone's a Critic

More Academic Scandals and Embarrassments at Boston University

Defending Students' Rights to Get the Education They Are Paying For

The posting below continues my account of my attempts to defend Boston University film students' rights to get the education they are paying so exorbitantly much for, and in many subtle and unsubtle ways being deceived about and cheated out of. — Ray Carney

We’ve all heard the plaint from the would-be waitress about
how in the world is someone to get their first waitressing job if restaurants
only hire waitresses with experience? Here’s a new solution to an old problem: Forget
waitressing and become a film professor in the Boston University program.

The previous posting described
how graduate students take undergraduate courses deceptively re-numbered and
listed as graduate courses and how the lowliest undergraduates and most senior
grad students are simply thrown together in the same classroom. If that state
of affairs, which negatively impacts the educations of both undergraduates and grad
students, is not intellectually fraudulent and pedagogically destructive enough,
another dirty secret of the film offerings is that the overwhelming majority of
teachers teaching these undergraduate-courses-masquerading-as-graduate-courses
are individuals who have no special training in, demonstrated research skills
in, important publications in, or special knowledge of film. We’ve all heard the
ironic put-down “everyone thinks he a critic”—well, the Boston University film
program has taken the irony away and made it official policy. Anyone who wants
to teach a film course is allowed to.

“Grow or die” is a bureaucratic axiom as applicable in
academia as in the rest of corporate America. Administrators who “grow their
programs”—who increase the number of teachers, courses, and students—are promoted
and rewarded; those who don’t find their programs eliminated, folded into
others, or are offered early retirement. (See the December posting“What’s Wrong with Boston University?” for
more on this subject and the high-handedness and rapidity with which the
university eliminates programs that aren’t growing.) The Director of Film
Studies understands the principle as well as anyone—clearly more than the
professor in the previous posting did. Five or six years ago (I’ve lost
count), he announced a vast expansion of the film studies program and even gave
the new program a new name: “The Cinema and Media Studies” program (institutionally
abbreviated “CIMS”). And he did it in the way most calculated to appeal to the
administrators over him so as to ensure future promotions and pay raises for
himself—not by doing the intellectually respectable thing: by hiring more film
professors to teach the new students in the new courses (an administrative no-no,
since that costs money) but by allowing more or less any full or part-time
faculty member in any department who wants to to teach film do it. They may
have been professors of history, psychology, Spanish, French, or German the
year before, but with the stroke of a pen, they became professors of film—even
though nothing else changed about them. Virtually without exception, the new
members of the Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS) faculty have no cinema or media
studies degrees; no education in film history, criticism, and analysis; no
knowledge of contemporary critical issues; and no published books on film (as I
point out on another blog page, "Real and Pretend Thinking in Film Studies," the
publication of a single-author book with a respected academic press is the only valid measure of a teacher’s scholarly
abilities and achievements in the field, where because of the pop-culture sales appeal of the subject so much of the research and writing is intellectually worthless).

In fact, the Boston University CIMS/Film Studies staffing situation is even
worse than the preceding description indicates. I know of several “film professors” in the CIMS and Film
Studies programs who do not have Ph.D.s in any field at all. Their most
advanced degree is a master’s degree from BU’s own film studies program. Their only
academic credential is that they are former master's degree students in the
program they are now elevated to teaching other grad students in. And if that sounds bad, I know worse than that. There are a whole other set of teachers in the film program who are teaching graduate students who are themselves only graduate students--though they generally don't reveal the fact to their students. One set of graduate students is allowed to teach another set of graduate students (without the teachers identifying themselves as such of course). These
non-Ph.D.s and non-graduates of the film program are not teaching low-level undergraduate courses; they are not
teaching small sections of large lecture courses; they are teaching juniors,
seniors, and, most shockingly of all, other grad students who call them “Professor” and are none the wiser
about their teachers’ lack of training, knowledge, Ph.D. degree, or fellow-student status. To add
injury to insult, I can testify since I had some of these glorified former students in my classes that they
are neither the best nor the best-educated former students either. Let it be
remembered, as per the preceding blog posting, they are students who themselves
received their classroom education taking deceptively re-numbered undergraduate
courses, sitting next to underclassmen, listening to lectures designed to be understood by sophomores, themselves being taught by non-Ph.D.s, by fellow second-rate grad students.

These are then the overwhelming majority of individuals now
teaching both undergraduate and graduate students in the BU film program. One
group of people with training, experience, and knowledge that does not include
film studies; another group with no Ph.D.s and no academic accomplishments or meaningful
publications at all; and a third group who are themselves only students a year or two or more further along in their studies than the grad students they are presuming to educate, evaluate, mentor, and grade. Can you imagine charging a grad student $50,000 to get their education by taking courses taught by another grad student? Can you imagine charging a grad student $50,000 to get their education by taking courses with teachers who have no demonstrated special training in, knowledge of, or publication record in the field they are teaching? Can you imagine charging a grad student $50,000 to get their education by taking courses with teachers who do not have Ph.D.s? Can you imagine charging a grad student $50,000 to get their education by taking courses listening to lectures intended for sophmore and other undergraduate non-majors, studying with them, sitting next to them for the entire semester in undergraduate courses that have deceptively been given a graduate-level designation? Can you imagine the physics department, the math
department, the philosophy department, the French department, the English
department allowing this—letting anyone who wanted to, Ph.D. or not,
experience, knowledge, graduate training, and scholarly achievement in the
field or not, teach not only undergraduates but graduate students? Well, the film studies/CIMS program has no problem with it at all--at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Come one, come all; and voila, you're a film professor. The previous
blog posting described one way students, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, are being deceived and cheated;
this is another. The vast majority of their teachers are not qualified—though the
students are the last to know it. No one reveals these facts to them at
orientations and open houses or on the university web site postings—and the faculty themselves
are sure not going to blow their own cover by revealing their absence of qualifications, if they even admit it to themselves. No one tells the grad students they will not only be receiving their graduate education listening to presentations designed for undergraduates, sitting next to sophomores, but that their teacher will not be a real teacher with an advanced degree but a non-Ph.D. or worse yet a fellow grad student who doesn't identify himself as just someone who went through the same slipshod educational experience a few years before, being taught by another non-Ph.D. or another second-rate grad student still in the program. Everyone's a critic, remember? The unspoken subtext is: "It's only film after all. Who needs special training and experience to teach it? Who needs an advanced degree to be knowledgeable about it? Who needs to be a scholar to be an expert on it? Who needs to be more than a current student to be qualified and certified to teach other grad students about it?" What secret contempt they have for the scholarly field they teach in, the art form they claim to revere. Though they'd never admit it, and of course can't themselves see it, they have the same contemptuous attitude toward the thing they teach as the art-hating Philistines they think they are so different from. The physicists and mathematicians at least respect the fields they teach in. That's why they put so many intellectual hurdles in the path of future teachers.

If one asks how can this happen, there are many answers,
most of them having to do with money. Boston University is a notoriously
“cash-poor” school. The endowment is miniscule, barely existent, compared to
private universities of similar size and age. After decades of student-hostile
administrative policies (many of them traceable to an arrogantly authoritarian university president
named John Sllber who ran the university for something like thirty years and
was guilty of absolutely breath-taking abuses of power and expressions of outright contempt for
all but a handful of the faculty and students), many alumni, not surprisingly, have
refused to give anything after they graduate. Expanding the film studies
program creates dozens of new film courses; film courses generate enrollments;
enrollments generate tuition dollars. Grow or die. What part of "it’s about the
money" don’t you understand?

But another reason this kind of intellectual scandal can
take place is undoubtedly traceable to the fact that the senior administrative
ranks in the university are filled with individuals with no academic background
or experience. (If a school regards itself as a business more than as an institution of higher learning—of the highest and most valuable kinds of learning, it appoints businessmen to run the show, to make hiring, promotion, teaching, and curriculum decisions. Faculty members, real academics, real intellectuals, real scholars, could never be trusted to do these things in the most profitable way.) Case in point: The Department of Film and Television is chaired by a former (and
still current) businessman who has never researched, written, or published anything academic in his entire life.
He’s a producer, a businessman who deals with budget and schedule issues. The College of Communication is headed by a Dean who is a
former newspaper editor—another individual with no academic background or
scholarly experience who spent most of his professional life dealing with schedules and
budgets. (The editor doesn’t write the stories, he assigns them.) And the Senior
Assistant Dean, the Dean’s right hand person who attends to most of the daily
functions of the College, is someone whose major professional experience prior
to assuming her post in the College, to the best of my knowledge, was in the
military. None of them has a Ph.D. (In fact, several colleagues have told me that
the Senior Assistant Dean doesn’t even have a Bachelor's degree.) None of them
has ever researched, written, or published a single piece of scholarship. The university
is run like a business by businessmen, by non-scholars, non-academics, non-intellectuals. Is it any surprise
that they don’t understand what’s wrong with faculty who aren’t credentialed,
published, trained scholars in the field they are teaching? Is it any
surprise they don’t understand the importance of someone teaching grad students in an intellectual discipline
holding a Ph.D.? Is it any surprise they have no conception of what constitutes research, scholarly publication, or high-level teaching? All three of these individuals confuse scholarship with writing something popular, something that reaches a lot of readers in a mass-market book, magazine, or newspaper, and confuse great teaching with course popularity—and award promotions and pay-raises accordingly. Something a high-level thinker and intellectual writes that is read by other high-level thinkers and intellectuals and may change the field, brilliant and innovative things he or she does in the classroom to inspire and change students' lives, don't count—in hiring, promotions, perks, or pay. It’s one more way in which the students are being cheated. Call it the
Boston University way: it's not about educating students; it's about saving money.

I’ve written memos and held meetings with these and other
administrators in which I have attempted to explain the embarrassment of a
university faculty being so egregiously unqualified, uncredentialed, untrained,
and unaccomplished in doing the job they are doing, and even memos and meetings in which I've dared to take on the issue of misplaced administrative values, the administrative failure to understand what constitutes real thinking and real scholarship, bearding the lion in its own den as it were by telling administrators to their faces in what ways their values are misplaced and decisions are mistaken, but I can’t say I’ve
reached any of them. In fact, all I’ve gotten for my trouble was a formal reprimand (in writing!) from my current Dean telling me that I should not have said what I had said and that there would be negative consequences for my having said it, threats from his predecessor to "dig up dirt" about me to get me fired if I didn't formally retract my statements and withdraw my memos, and years of pay hits, personal attacks, and a wide-range of professional retaliation from my Chairman. There are too many things to list, but suffice it to say that he has followed in the Dean's footsteps in attempting to "dig up dirt" to use against me by secretly and surreptitiously calling people I know outside of BU and asking them about me, and to put some bite into his retaliation has rejected my application for a sabbatical I was entitled to take, even as my Dean has chimed in on that front by telling me he would only grant me a sabbatical if I submitted my resignation first (you got that?), and that short of my agreeing to resign my position he'd personally make sure that I would absolutely never, ever get a sabbatical, then, now, or at any future date, which of course I haven't! It’s another aspect of the
Boston University way: forget about respecting and honoring extraordinarily productive, nationally and internationally recognized scholars and teachers, or even giving them the semblance of fair treatment. Faculty who are foolish enough to dare to speak truth to power are punished to attempt to bring them back into line, or better yet, to get them to quit in disgust. (There's another illustration of that policy with respect to one of the most senior, distinguished professors in the entire university, in the “What’s Wrong with Boston University?” blog posting I mentioned above.) These and dozens of other similar acts, needless to say, aren't the actions of "loose cannons" in one or another college or department. Administrators, Deans and department Chairmen in my case and that of the other senior distinguished professor do not indulge in these kinds of thuggishness, make these kinds of threats (and dozens of others over a period of many years), and scheme in these underhanded ways against particular faculty members (like the secret phone calls made to people I know to attempt to gather information to use against me or, in the case of the other professor, scheming to undermine or discontinue an academic program without telling the director of it what is going on) without the full knowledge and consent of (and most likely without being explicitly directed to do so by) Boston University Provost Jean Morrison—and if they did do them behind her back and without her approval, they should be fired or disciplined posthaste. I wonder how long it'll be till that happens. I'm not holding my breath. Of course, being told to do these things by the university's chief academic officer only makes the treatment even more reprehensible. In that case, it's Provost Morrison who should be fired or disciplined. Let's see how long it takes Robert Brown (the university President) and the Boston University Board of Trustees to look into that.

I'll have more to say about the threats, thuggery, and punishments Boston University administrators are willing to resort to to protect their own institutional self-interest in future postings. These guys do not play softball.

A view from the Inside of an American University--Struggling to Defend Academic Freedom

College of Communication, 640 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, United States

Prof. Ray Carney has been working to reform Boston University's policies to censor faculty speech, publications, and teaching methods for more than 10 years. In response, he has experienced a variety of retaliatory punishments from BU administrators at all levels, but says he is "fighting the good fight, for the soul of the institution I have given the best (and worst) years of my career to—and for the good of future faculty members and students, who deserve to function in an environment in which a wide range of opinions can be expressed without fear of bureaucratic, financial, and personal retaliation." His faculty web site has been officially censored and banned by the Boston University College of Communication Dean and University Provost; he has been prevented from teaching courses in the film major; and has been punished financially and bureaucratically for expressing views about the function of education that Boston University administrators have disagreed with. Prof. Carney is the author or editor of more than fifteen books and 100 essays translated into more than 10 languages and is a world-renowned speaker on art, culture, and academic freedom of expression.